Seeing on a Saturday morning an entry titled Most Secure Browser: Internet Explorer 8 in my feedreader certainly did not help my hangover and having read the entry 3 times now I think I still am living a vivid Friday night session. Bloggers love Firefox and many of us will never change because of the flexibility and extensions available for Firefox. You need to know it though: the safest browser out there is Internet Explorer 8!

I am sure you now all have fired up IE8 of course. Nor did I, but that’s mainly because I’m on a Mac and have not touched Windows at all anymore since I switched two years ago. Still it is a fact now and Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo published the results of a security poll, conducted by NSS Labs among the 5 top browsers and Internet Explorer 8 came out on top.

Especially in the malware detection department IE8 scored very well and left any other browser far behind.

Safari 4 presented a declined compared to the previous tests, with two short periods of sever security dips

Chrome 2 performed very consistently, albeit very poorly

Also in the phishing detection department IE8 scored best, closely followed by Firefox 3 (with the Google anti-phishing add-on).

In both tests the fast Safari and Google Chrome browsers performed rather badly and the three people using Opera (OK, four) also better know what links they click. You can read more and see examples at Giorgio’s blog or dicover the truth about the poll.I will gladly continue using Safari 4 and give everyone details to my empty bank account.

I have IE 8 on a Windows 7 install, and yes, they way they are shipping IE 8 just may be a little more secure than Firefox, et al. The problem is, it seems as if they’ve simply turned everything off by default in IE 8. Given the same settings (ie javascript and java applets) turned off, and the other little things that most websites require to work these days turned off, it may be a little more secure. That said, I doubt IE 8 will stack up as well with the settings evenly matched. It’s kinda like Microsoft boasting about how secure Windows is…when not connected to a network……

Chad’s right. They do nothing more than leave the defauts set to a higher tollerance. Not to say that it isn’t a vast improvement over previous IE versions, but I believe that Firefox + NoScript + AdBlock Plus = Best browser security

I’m one of the five (cause yes, we’re five not four :) ) Opera users, and yes, we have to be careful what links we click on, but at least we don’t have to care about a ton of vulnerabilities. The Symantech Internet Security Threat Report for 2009 says IE is still the worst.. and Opera the best!

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